Sequels, Series, and Remakes

SERIALS

Unlike series, serials are marked by continuous story lines. They emerged
in the United States and France in the early 1910s, nearly always in
melodramatic adventure mode. Prompted by the success of series films, and
in the United States by the practice of showing one or two reels of
multireel films on separate days, serial films drew as well on traditions
of serialized storytelling established in the early nineteenth century and
perpetuated in the early twentieth by mass circulation newspapers,
journals, and magazines. The links between them became clear when episodes
of
What Happened to Mary?
, often cited as the first US film serial, were published in prose form in
McClure's Ladies World
in 1912, and when
Fantômas
, an adaptation of a series of crime novels, was released in France in
1913 and 1914. Most of the episodes of
What Happened to Mary?
and
Fantômas
were in fact self-contained. The first true US serial, a form in which
each episode ended in a cliffhanger, was
The Adventures of Kathlyn
. It, too, was serialized in prose form, as were
Dollie of the Dailies
(1914),
The Million Dollar Mystery
(1914), and others.

Between 1907 and 1925 Louis Feuillade directed over eight hundred films
in almost every contemporary genre in France, but he is now best
remembered as the producer, director, and writer of serials. His career
in the cinema began when he was hired as a screenwriter by Gaumont in
1905, becoming Head of Production two years later. In 1910 he began
making films in series.
Fantômas
, his first serial, went into production in 1913.

Based on a series of novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Silvestre,
Fantômas
(1913–1914) details the exploits of an arch-criminal and master
of disguise and the efforts of a detective and a journalist to catch
him. Set and filmed in contemporary Paris, it involves multiple acts of
villainy and numerous sequences of pursuit, entrapment, and escape.
Building on these elements, Feuillade's next serial,
Les Vampires
(1915–1916), centers on a gang of arch-criminals. Putting even
more emphasis on disguise and multiple identity, Feuillade stages the
gang's exploits, entrances, and escapes in such a way as to
suggest almost uncanny or magical powers. The film's most
striking character, Irma Vep (Musidora), is a true femme fatale, a
figure of fear and fascination alike.

Although championed by the members of the French avant-garde, both
Les Vampires
and
Fantômas
were vilified by those who wished to elevate the cultural status of
film in France. As a result, Feuillade gave his next serial,
Judex
(1917), an uplifting moral tone. Musidora was again cast as the
villain. But the eponymous detective is the film's central
character, his signature black cape the equivalent of the costumes worn
by the criminals in Feuillade's earlier serials. Other serials
followed, but they have rarely been studied in detail. However,
historians of film style have shown renewed interest in Feuillade.

For many years Feuillade was considered a director whose use of deep
staging and single-shot tableaux rendered him a conservative, someone
who resisted the tendency toward analytical editing evident in some of
his contemporaries. Later film historians, however, have seen his work
as a variant on a distinct European style, its subtleties lying in the
choreography of action and spectatorial attention across the duration of
shots and scenes. From this perspective, Feuillade's style, one
built on continual transformations in the flow of appearance,
complements his fascination with protean identity and with the
potentially unending structure of serial forms.

The centering of serials on heroines was a distinct US phenomenon,
launching Kathlyn Williams, Helen Holmes, Grace Cunard, Ruth Roland, Pearl
White, and other "serial queens" to stardom. However,
although serials were produced in ever-greater numbers by the end of the
1910s, the principal attraction in cinemas was the feature film. Hence
serials were increasingly

Louis Feuillade.

produced as low-budget specialties by second-string studios like
Universal, Vitagraph, Pathé, and Arrow, and focused more and more
on male rather than female protagonists. With the establishment of the
studio system, the coming of sound, the advent of the B film, and then the
economic difficulties of the Great Depression, serials remained the
province of "Poverty Row" specialists like Republic and
Mascot (the term "Poverty Row" refers to the section of
Hollywood around Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street in which the offices of
a number of specialists in low-budget productions were located), and minor
majors like Universal and Columbia. Designed principally for children
attending matinees on Saturday mornings, serials in the 1930s and 1940s
often borrowed characters and story lines from comic strips and comic
books (the Green Hornet, Dick Tracy, and Captain Marvel) and sometimes
mixed genres (
The Phantom Empire
, 1935) in order to augment their exotic appeal. Westerns, mysteries,
jungle stories, science-fiction stories, aviation stories, and
swashbucklers were otherwise the principal types. Serials like
Flash Gordon
(1936) were so popular that two sequels,
Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars
(1938) and
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe
(1940), were produced in serial form and edited feature-length versions
made of all three.

Serial production continued apace during World War II, often featuring
Axis powers and agents as villains, but began to slow down during the
period of industry recession and audience decline in the late 1940s. By
the early 1950s Columbia and Republic were the only studios making
serials, and as serials old and new became a television staple, production
for the cinema in the United States ceased altogether after the release of
Perils of the Wilderness
and
Blazing the Overland Trail
in 1956.